The present invention relates to a method for printing image material in an inkjet printer. In addition, the invention relates to a device for carrying out the method.
The U.S. Pat. No. 6,003,988 discloses an inkjet printer that can be used to print on moving paper. However, a high-precision paper feed is required in order to print accurately on the moving paper. The paper feed should essentially be isolated from vibrations, such that the same advance between the printed lines is always ensured and no density fluctuations occur. This is because the human eye is very sensitive to such errors. However, such high precision feed devices are very elaborate and expensive.
Furthermore, inkjet printers are known that are equipped with an inkjet print head that covers the image material to be printed on its entire width, such that an entire line can be created without a movement of the inkjet print head. However, such inkjet print heads are expensive due to their special manufacture.
Finally, for industrial digital printing machines, a two-dimensional arrangement of print heads is known, where several print heads with the same ink color are arranged adjacent to one another in the scan direction (y direction) and of different ink colors perpendicular to the scan direction (x direction). However, such an arrangement necessitates a relatively long print carriage reducing the print capacity because of the adverse ratio between scan path and utilizable print path. In addition, this arrangement includes the risk of inks from several print heads bleeding into each other, because different colors are printed right after each other, and especially with fast printing, the ink of the previous print heads has not yet dried when the next color is printed. With bi-directional printing, mixed colors may look different because the application of the inks onto the image material occurs in a different order.